Dialing In: A Strategy To Maximize Your Current Job Part 2

In The Truth About You, Marcus Buckingham shares how former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani came across as a gifted public speaker arguing his cases in the court room when he worked as a prosecutor. When he gave talks while running for office though, he came across as stiff. He really struggled when he had to stand behind a podium and give a talk to a room full of people. He hired a speech coach, he practiced constantly, he read speeches of other great speakers but he continued to come across a bit like a robot.

One night his speech coach asked him, “Is there any part of the speaking process that you really look forward to?’’

Giuliani responded, “I like arguing, I like taking a question and then making a case for why my answer is the best answer.”

So he and his coach set about a strategy of re-shaping his talks. He began standing behind the podium to make a few brief remarks and then comes out front and takes questions, arguing his case. It worked brilliantly. He began coming across loose, natural, and comfortable in his own skin. And then an interesting thing happened. Over time he also became more comfortable when he was forced to give talks that didn’t allow for his now signature interactive style.

This is a great story that can be applied to any number of jobs. Is there any piece of a mostly uncomfortable job that you do well? How can you expand that piece so that it eclipses the parts that you don’t do as well?

Dialing In: A Strategy To Maximize Your Current Job

How many ways are their to be really effective at your job? Probably a lot more than you think. In my work as a manager, I have observed sales people reach the pinnacle of success with quite different strengths and ways of going about their job. This is possible with most jobs including the job of running the country. Let’s consider our first four presidents. Did they have similar strengths that led to similar ways of operating in office? Not at all.

George Washington was the military strategist who projected an image of consistency and stability. He had no great gift as a visionary but his cool even temperament served us well as he united a young country. The second president, John Adams was a phenomenal orator and skilled debater. It was said that he could hold Congress in rapt attention for hours as he waxed on eloquently about his positions on Britain, France and so on. He was at his best when voicing his opposition to a real or perceived foe.

Thomas Jefferson was completely different yet. Unlike the orator Adams, Jefferson hated public speaking. In fact, he hated it so much that he refused to give the traditional State of the Union message to Congress each year. He was a grand strategist that loved sitting at his desk, thinking and writing. He wrote out the State of the Union speech and had his assistant read it.

James Madison was different still. He was a very precise thinker and the consummate networker. He loved roaming the floors of Congress, meeting one on one, collaborating and building alliances to accomplish his goals for the country.

All three could rightly be held up as examples of great presidents. But each understood their strengths and weaknesses proceeding to shape the job around who they were. List any other four great presidents in history and you’ll see much of the same principle at work. Lincoln, the melancholy who suffered great bouts of depression worked quite different than the energetic Theodore Roosevelt.

On October 19, 2009 USA Today ran a similar story about the nine current US Supreme Court Justices. Politics aside, they perform the same job quite differently.  Chief Justice John Robert’s sharp questions come quickly. John Paul Stevens prefers to let his colleagues jump in first. Stephen Breyer is known for his hypothetical questions. Clarence Thomas believes a lawyer should be able to make a case without interruption and thus remains mostly silent. Antonin Scalia is the wise-cracker in the group. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a stickler for precise facts.

Check out our job-shaping links to the right.  Their are a number of resources that will help you think about ways to shape your own job around your unique strengths.

A Strategy For Dialing In Your Career

One of my favorite "Maximize Your Career" stories comes from Lance Armstrong. It is detailed in his book, “It’s Not About The Bike” and also highlighted in Brian Souza’s excellent book, “Become Who You We’re Born To Be”.

As you may know, Armstrong is a six time winner of what may be the world’s most grueling sports event, the Tour de France. What you may not know is how hard Armstrong had to work to find his niche, his area of greatness.  Lance grew up in football-crazy Plano, Texas. It didn’t take him long to figure out he was just plain lousy at anything that involved eye-hand coordination or side to side movement. In fact, he discovered, if the sport involved any sort of ball, he didn’t do so well. Most of us have experiences like this. It allows us to rule some things out quickly.

But Armstrong became very focused on finding something he could be great at. At age 12, he gave swimming a shot, and after almost drowning a few times his coach put him in a class with the 7 year olds. He was a bit humiliated, but he didn’t give up. He actually developed fairly quickly and by the end of his first year, he took 4th in the state at the 1500 meter free-style.

In order to get in two swim practices a day he rode his bike to school. That gave him six miles a day in the water and twenty miles round trip on the bike. At age thirteen, he spotted a flyer for a swim-bike-run junior triathlon. At the time it seemed like a lark… he’d never heard of a triathlon before, but amazingly he entered and won.

Although he was a top junior in swimming, Armstrong reflected, he’d never been the absolute best at it. But in Triathlons, he was best in the whole state. He hadn’t quite discovered the arena where he would become insanely great, but he was in the vicinity. By age sixteen, he had become a professional triathlete, and by the time he was a high school senior he had a growing career with sponsors knocking on his door.  Eventually he began to focus on cycling. After countless hours of hard work and sacrifice he became the world’s best.
Lance Armstrong’s story reveals several transferable concepts:

1. Try stuff and quickly eliminate some things that don’t show promise.
2. Get in the vicinity. Find some things you can be good at and work at them.
3. Keep trying things with an eye out for that one thing you can be insanely great at.
4. Once you find it, work harder than any one else to develop it.

You Have A Strategy That Is Perfectly...

I don’t suppose it’s a news flash that chess is strategy game. One of the first books I ever received as a young child was a chess book written by a business associate of my dad. It was a new type of instructional in a question and answer format that came with a book mark slide piece that was designed to progressively reveal the answers after I had an opportunity to figure it out for myself. I didn’t get far with the book or go on to excel at chess but the book was such a cool concept. Really it was the instructional strategy I remember more than the content of anything in the book.

Another cool chess related concept was found in the television show “Have Gun Will Travel”. It was a western starring Richard Boone who played the hero known as Palidin. In case you were not privileged to see this show it’s available here. If you are satisfied to just know more I’ll refer you to Wikipedia… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Gun_-_Will_Travel.  Paladin had a business card with the black knight and like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet, he had an ample supple of these black knight chess pieces to leave behind after he solved a case. And like any hero, western or otherwise Paladin had a strategy that was unique to his character.

….(Flash forward about 40 years) I was innocently riding along in my car probably about circa 2006 listening to one of my favorite communicators Andy Stanley. All of a sudden these words attacked me from the car speakers… “You have a strategy that is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting”. Then he repeated it… and spent several minutes explaining what he meant. I won’t give you the rest word for word but the upshot is this:

Each of us has a strategy for everything we do. We may not be aware of it, the strategy may not be well thought out, it might not be thought out at all. Our strategy may be to wing it. Our strategy may be to make it up as we go along. But we have a strategy for every single thing we do in life… and it’s that strategy that is creating results we are getting... for better or for worse...for richer or for poorer. (They’re taking this phrase out of a lot wedding vows these days and that too suggests a strategy… but I digress…)

This is true about our diet. It’s true about our exercise. It’s true about our finances. It’s true about our relationships. It’s true about our interaction or lack of it with God. And to our primary point in this blog, it’s true about our career. You already have a strategy. The question we all need to ask is respectfully borrowed from television therapist Dr. Phil: “How’s that workin for ya?” How is your career strategy working for you?

This blog is filled with “strategic alternatives” or approaches designed to assist you in an attempt to “Maximize Your Career”. Every single idea presented here may not be for you. But take a few minutes right now and think about your current career strategy. Does it need tweaking? Is your strategy to wing it? Maybe your strategy is to analyze and reanalyze to the point you never execute on anything. Get a pen and notebook and jot down your strategy.

Genius of the Seven Day Plan

Seven is among other things thought of as the number of completion. Genesis tells us that God created the whole universe in Seven days. In fact, He likes the week frame so much that later in Scripture He talks about a "week of weeks" and "week of years" etc.. This is a wonderful planning time frame to get things accomplished at work. Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, in his Biography shared how he spent two hours every Sunday evening planning his week. Then , he would schedule according to his highest priorities. Stephen Covey in his 7 Habits Series recommends planning in 7 day increments.

And Strengths Expert Marcus Buckingham in his wonderful book, “Go, Put Your Strengths To Work” says this:

“The most effective routine is a Strong Week Plan.  There’s magic in the seven days of a week. When you are asked to plan for next year, you may manage to define a few carefully calibrated goals: what you will get done. But you rarely take it down to the level of specific activities: what you will actually be doing. Even a month is too long a time frame to wrap your head around. Whereas, at the other extreme, days, hours, and minutes are too disjointed to provide you any real momentum.

Only a week strikes the perfect balance and the psychological note… There’s just something quintessentially useful about the scale of a week. And this should be no surprise. A week was designed this way. It was designed expressly to meet the psychological needs of human beings, something you can’t say about any other unit of time...And they are highly resilient to modification. The most recent redesign of the week was attempted by the French revolutionaries in 1793, who changed a week from seven to ten days and renamed it, confusingly, a “decade”. Needless to say, this redesign didn’t last long—more than a “decade”, but less than a decade.”


If you are currently in a career that is essentially a good fit for you, but maybe not a perfect fit, Buckingham’s job crafting method that he outlines in “Go, Put Your Strengths To Work” is phenomenal. The book is our Amazon resource of the day and his Dvd is in our resource center at the column to the right. If you want to take his workshop it is available for free in our guest teaching sessions courtesy of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

If you are unemployed, Harvey MacKay makes the wise suggestion that looking for a job is your job. In the free resources that accompany the promotion of his latest book, he offers a Week Planner Page for job seekers. You can find that in a group of pdf files under Career Links and Harvey MacKay or just click on the link here:  http://www.harveymackay.com/pdfs/gettingajob.pdf

Note: For some reason this link can be a little finicky...you may have to try it 2 or 3 times.